Tuesday, April 10, 2012

World Bank to Introduce Open Access Policy

The
World Bank has announced
today that it is introducing an Open Access (OA) policy. This will mandate that
World Bank research outputs and knowledge products are deposited in a newly-created
institutional repository called the Open Knowledge Repository (OKR), which will be freely
accessible on the Internet.

In
addition, the Bank will become the first major international organisation to make
much of its research output available under Creative Commons licensing. As
a result, any user in the world will be able to read, download, save, copy,
print, reuse and link to the full text of the World Bank’s work, free of
charge.

The
World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to
developing countries for capital programs. Its official goal is to reduce
poverty and support development.

Back in the driving seat

The
precise details of the Bank’s policy will depend on whether the work in
question has been published by the Bank itself, or by an external publisher.

For
work published by the Bank, electronic copies of complete, final manuscripts that have been approved for release to the public
on or after July 1, 2012, as well as the associated metadata, will be immediately
deposited in OKR.

These
works will be made available under the most liberal Creative Commons licence,
the Creative Commons Attribution (“CC BY”) copyright
license, which places no restrictions on its use except proper attribution.

Where
an external publisher is responsible for publishing the work, the policy will require
that the final word-processed version
of the text is submitted to the OKR upon acceptance of the manuscript for
publication. The work will then become immediately available to Bank staff, but
released to the public only after the publisher’s embargo has elapsed.

As such, the policy recognises that most publishers currently insist on an embargo
period (a.k.a. delayed open
access) before any work they have published can be made publicly available in
an institutional repository.

After
the respective publisher’s embargo elapses, externally published works will be
made available free of charge to all under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial,
No-Derivatives (“CC NC ND”) license, unless the publisher accepts the use of
a more liberal license.

The
mandate will also apply to the Bank’s own two journals —World Bank Research Observer (WBRO) and World
Bank Economic Review (WBER), which are currently published by Oxford University Press (OUP) under third-party publisher agreements. Here too, the publisher’s
embargo will be respected.

We
should note that OUP currently has one of the more restrictive self-archiving
policies, and imposes a lengthy embargo period of 18 months. Perhaps for this reason, although
the Bank will not (like the Public
Access Policy of the National Institutes of
Health) itself prescribe an embargo period, it has stressed that it
“expects the amount of time it takes for externally published Bank content to
be included in its institutional repository to diminish over time”.

Nevertheless,
the Bank’s OA policy will be a powerful new signal to publishers that times are
changing, and content creators intend to get back into the driving seat when it
comes to deciding when and how work they create is made available to the
public. And experience shows that achieving OA has to be viewed as a brick-by-brick
process.

Introduced
in April 2010, the Open Data Initiative ended the Bank’s practice of selling
its World
Development Indicators data, when it made its more than 7,000
development indicators — along with more than 60 other datasets — freely
available on its web site.

The
Access to Information Policy, introduced in July 2010, transformed the way in
which the Bank makes it data available to the public, and saw the release of more
than 17,000 historical documents from its archives.

As
a next logical step, the Bank's OA policy will provide a number of important new benefits.
By creating a single, searchable database of all its information, for instance,
the Bank will make it easier for users to locate and access the data they need.

Moreover,
the OKR is OAI compliant, so
it will be interoperable with other repositories. Amongst other things, this
will enable OKR data to be “harvested” and made available through third-party
services like RePEc (Research
Papers in Economics) and Google Scholar. This will see the Bank’s content potentially becoming accessible to many more people.

Further,
by requiring that Bank-generated content published by external publishers is
deposited in OKR the new policy will ensure that work previously locked behind
subscription paywalls will become freely available. (The World Bank eLibrary, however, will
remain a subscription-based product for librarians, researchers and heavy users
of bank research products).

Importantly,
by using Creative Commons licensing the Bank will make it possible for anyone
to distribute, reuse, and build upon its published work, even (in most cases)
commercially, so long as the Bank is credited for the original creation.

Commenting
on today’s announcement World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said, “Knowledge
is power. Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others
to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Our new Open Access
policy is the natural evolution for a World Bank that is opening up more and
more.”

Significant for three reasons

OKR
is, in fact, already live, and
currently contains more than 2,100 books and papers (from 2009-2012) across
a wide range of topics and all regions of the world. This includes the World Development Report, other World
Bank annual flagship publications, academic books, practitioner volumes, and
the Bank’s publicly disclosed country studies and analytical reports. In
addition, articles published in WBRO
and WBER between 2007-2010 are also
now freely available in OKR.

OA advocates have welcomed the development. “Today's
announcement is significant for three reasons,” explains Peter Suber, director of
the Harvard Open
Access Project.
“First, the World Bank is following up on its open data policy of April 2010.
Its experience with open data led it to commit even further to open research,
not to retreat.

“Second,
the Bank made itself a leader, along with other institutions like the Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust, in moving beyond gratis
OA mandates, which make work free of charge, to libre
OA mandates, which make work free of charge and free for reuse under open
licenses.”

He
adds, “Libre OA mandates were very rare as recently as last year. While the
RCUK and Wellcome Trust have announced plans
to strengthen their existing policies from gratis to libre OA, the World Bank
is now the first major international organization to have actually adopted a
libre mandate.

“Finally,”
Suber concludes, “this policy applies to a major body of research on poverty
and development. If there is one area where we would all want to maximize the
impact and utility of research, it is the area covered by the World Bank.”

I
hope in the near future to explore the Bank’s OA strategy more fully in an
interview with its publisher Carlos Rossel. [This interview can now be read here].